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Creating Secondary Animation Using Dynamics in Maya

by Antony Ward

In this tutorial, you'll learn some of Maya's often overlooked tools which if embraced, can help dramatically speed up your workflow. Software required: Maya 2014.

What you'll learn

In this tutorial, you'll learn some of Maya's often overlooked tools which if embraced, can help dramatically speed up your workflow. We'll begin by utilizing its dynamics systems to automate the animation of key areas, like the snakes on Medusa's head, while also adding the ability to override the snakes motion, allowing an animator to also pose and hand animate them as well. Once the dynamics are in place, we'll look at MEL, Maya's powerful scripting language, to help create and apply a basic rig to tie all the controls together. Finally we'll look at using nCache as well as baking the dynamics onto the joints so the animation can be exported to a game engine or another application without any loss of data. By the end of this training you'll have the ability to build a controllable dynamic based system into your own characters, or even environments, as well as generate a simple script to help with those repetitive tasks. Software required: Maya 2014.

About the author

Antony Ward is a Freelance Digital Artist, Animator and Writer based in the UK. Since the early 1990`s he has worked in, and along side the game development industry for some of today's biggest companies at a senior level. Since going Freelance he has branched out into new areas and has also found the time to write three technical manuals, Game Character Development in Maya (2004), Game Character Development (2008) and 3D Modeling in Silo (2010) as well as many published tutorials. These have pr... more

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